STEM

8/28/2013

When Anna Eshoo was in middle school she wanted to be an eye doctor. She didn't know why, but she liked going to the doctor and all the things they did. But a teacher told her to forget her dream. "Girls aren't good at math," she told her. Eshoo, who has served in Congress for more than 20 years, was at Campbell Middle School Thursday to encourage girls -- and boys-- not to be held back from their dreams.

Students from the Colonial School District (in Plymouth Meeting, Pa.) enjoyed their best showing ever at the 2013 Technology Student Association National Conference, earning three first-place trophies and three third-place trophies. More than 5,000 students from the U.S., Germany, and Turkey competed in more than 60 events, ranging from animation to robotics and biotechnology.

If people weren't so eager to run from them or kill them, we could actually learn a fair amount from zombies. To encourage this learning, Texas Instruments, alongside the National Academy of Sciences, is launching a new series of in-class tools and lessons for teachers called "STEM Behind Hollywood."

To close the gender gap in New York City science classrooms, City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn would create five new science schools exclusively for girls. Quinn unveiled her bold plan to boost female participation in STEM at a Monday press conference in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

8/21/2013

The partnership emerges from the demand to incorporate STEM to develop innovative solutions for real-world issues. Currently, the Air Force’s humanitarian and search and rescue missions have increasingly relied on technological advances to save lives threatened by natural disasters.

A new pilot program aims to address the lack of women in technology fields by starting early. The AspireIT program, from the nonprofit National Center for Women & Information Technology, pairs female high school and college students with K12 education organizations, such as ISTE and The College Board, to run computing outreach programs for middle school girls.

8/20/2013

Surrounded by colorful number cards, beads and blocks, dozens of elementary teachers from across Louisville sat inside a packed training room last week, learning a new way of teaching math that focuses on problem-solving and in-depth understanding.

8/9/2013

School Committee member David Birnbach is one of the driving players behind STEAM Studio, a school for ninth- through 12th-graders. The proposal for a charter high school in Andover (Mass.) caught many in the town off guard this week—as much for who is proposing it as the fact that it’s being proposed at all.

7/31/2013

Schools are not getting a big enough bang for their education technology buck. A new report says that while computers and internet access are common in the classroom, students are often using this technology for simple foundational exercises, rather than higher-order data analysis or statistics work that will help prepare them for the modern workforce.

7/26/2013

The Obama administration’s fiscal year 2014 budget lays out a sweeping restructuring intended to consolidate STEM education in the U.S. into three agencies—the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution—and to cut down on the inefficiency of overlapping initiatives.